Multipolarity - the choice of up and coming powers
Cold
War rhetoric is once again beginning to bedevil the relations of the big
powers. For instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently berated
the US as behaving imperialistically in world affairs and of triggering
a new arms race by planning to expand an anti-missile defence shield in
parts of Eastern Europe.
"There was a desire among several international actors to dictate
their will to each and everyone and to act not in accordance with the
norms of international life and law. This is very dangerous and
unhealthy... In our view it is nothing other than diktat, than
imperialism", Putin was quoted recently as saying. He also said that
tensions had emerged in inter-state relations of late "because the world
changed and there was an attempt to make it unipolar" following the
break-up of the Soviet Union.

HEILIGENDAMM, - GERMANY-: German Chancellor Angela Merkel chats with
Russian President Vladimir Putin as she greets him prior to a
working session 07 June 2007 on the second day of the G8 summit in
Heiligendamm. The leaders of the G8 nations, Britain, Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States,
gathered in the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm for three days of
talks focusing on climate change and development aid to Africa. AFP |
Punctuating these stinging comments of a Cold War kind were some
developments on the ground which were starkly evocative of the dangerous
arms races of the NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation years. Reports said
that Russia had test-fired a new inter-continental ballistic missile
(ICBM), the RS 24, "capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads". This
is seen as an attempt to counter US moves to bolster an anti-missile
defence shield in countries which were at one time considered Soviet
satellites, such as Poland and the Czech Republic.
A Kremlin spokesman was quoted saying that Russia was planning a
"totally effective" response to US plans on installing the anti-missile
system in those parts of Europe which were under the influence of the
Soviet Union.
All this came in the wake of the G8 summit in Germany which brought
together the world's foremost powers on deliberations concerning the
world's economic future. The issues in both sets of developments are not
unrelated because they all essentially impinge on the distribution of
wealth and power in the current political economy.
The angry public protests which greeted the G8 Summit demonstrated
the degree to which economic globalization is yet to prove a genuine
equalizer, in terms of power and wealth, among states and within states.
To be sure, the vast majority of states swear by economic
liberalization and the market system and this includes Russia. But the
issue to contend with is that within this "comity" of liberalized
economies, some states are "more equal" than others.
The US, for instance, continues to be the world's mightiest economic
power. China is the world's fastest growing economy and India too is
indicating its ability to be one of the world's bounciest economies.
It is among these up-and-coming economies that there is a growing
concern over "unipolarity", or to put it in more simple terms, the might
and wealth of the US. These emerging big powers would like to see the
current political economy as "multipolar" rather than "unipolar",
because it is in the former order that they too could expend in economic
and material terms. Accordingly, they would look apprehensively at
"imperialistic" modes of behaviour and designs and plans that smack of
hegemonism.
These preoccupations with power would naturally spill over into arms
races because economic and military might combine in national power and
pushes states up the global power league. |